AKA: Local agreement doesn’t guarantee global truth, and why (some) philosophers keep missing this
The reverse elephant is counterintuitive, and it’s the central claim of a book I’m working on. Everyone can agree on the details and still be wrong about the whole.
A few months ago, Matt Segall asked me to make the case at Mind at Large, a consciousness conference hosted by the Center for Process Studies. I said yes. Then I had to write the talk. Every sentence I wrote was horrible, and I couldn’t fill five minutes. Then, somehow, it ballooned to over two hours. I didn’t sleep the night before, so I delivered this sorely deprived, but here’s what I ended up with, along with the Q&A that followed.
We cover:
Why the elephant metaphor has it backwards.
Four ways a local account can fail to extend globally. Gödel’s the famous one. The other three are the ones that most people don’t know about.
Three senses of “irreducibility” we conflate.
Five types of “theory of everything.” Four of them despise …
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